Presidential candidate Ted Cruz loved to argue as a Harvard student and boasted he'd get the best grades in his class, only to lose out to two other classmates. In a series of exclusive interviews with Metro, several of his former classmates painted a complex portrait of the Tea Party's most beloved presidential candidate. Laurence Tribe, a longtime Harvard law professor, said Cruz took his constitutional law class, challenged his teacher in interesting and "invariably right-leaning" ways at every turn. Tribe said Cruz bragged to many of his classmates that he would receive the highest grade in the class, which...

Not Every Leak Is Fit to Print Why have federal prosecutors subpoenaed a New York Times reporter?by Gabriel Schoenfeld 02/18/2008, Volume 013, Issue 22 Investigations of national-security leaks in Washington are not all that rare. But until Judith Miller of the New York Times was sent to jail for 85 days by a special prosecutor digging into the Valerie Plame imbroglio, investigations of such leaks in which journalists are subpoenaed were about as common as unicorns wandering the National Mall. We now have another such unicorn. On January 24, a federal grand jury in Alexandria issued a subpoena to...

Yemen's crisis is getting worse and then some. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies have started bombing rebel positions inside Yemen. The Sunni Kingdom added that it would do "anything necessary" to deter the Iran-backed Shiite rebels who are taking over Yemen and trying to oust US-backed President Abd Rabbah Mansur Hadi. A Saudi source told Reuters that ground troops might be needed in Yemen to "restore order." Saudi Arabia is reportedly contributing as many as 150,000 troops and 100 warplanes to the campaign against the Houthis.

Secret intelligence files held by Yemeni security forces and containing details of American intelligence operations in the country have been looted by Iran-backed militia leaders, exposing names of informants and plans for U.S.-backed counter-terrorism operations, U.S. officials say. U.S. intelligence officials believe additional files were handed directly to Iranian advisors by Yemeni officials who have sided with the Houthi militias that seized control of the capital of Sana last September and later toppled the U.S.-backed president. For American intelligence networks in Yemen, the damage has been severe. Until recently, U.S. forces deployed in Yemen had worked closely with President Abdu...

The 3D printing industry is still very much in its infancy. But that could change if the CIA has its way. The intelligence agency's venture capital firm just invested in Voxel8, the company behind the first multi-material, 3D electronics printer. What does the CIA want with 3D printing? We can only guess at this point, but we may hear stories one day of how some futuristic James Bond 3D-printed his own gadgets in the field. What's the potential impact for consumers? The move might just jumpstart a field that has so far been struggling to find its footing. Voxel8 says...

(AUDIO-AT-LINK)Scientists studying the difference between human and chimpanzee DNA have found one stretch of human DNA that can make the brains of mice grow significantly bigger. "It's likely to be one of many DNA regions that's critical for controlling how the human brain develops," says Debra Silver, a neurobiologist at Duke University Medical School. It could also help explain why human brains are so much bigger than chimp brains, says Silver, who notes that "there are estimates of anywhere from two to four times as big." In addition to having bigger brains, Silver says, humans also "have more neurons, and...

If education is an escalator to lift people from poverty, young African American males are languishing at the bottom level. Only about 60 percent of them will earn high school diplomas, and roughly four in 10 drop out before graduation day. That’s compared with a 65-percent graduation rate for Latino males and 80 percent for young white men. Meanwhile, the graduation gap between young black men and their white peers has grown even wider, jumping about 10 percent in a little over a year. Those are just some of the sobering takeaways from the 10th biannual Schott Foundation report on...

Awkward. Members of the House Intelligence Committee were not briefed on the plans the White House announced today for a new cyber integration center modeled on the National Counterterrorism Center, a source with knowledge of the discussions told POLITICO. And they’re not happy about it. The Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center, projected to have a staff of 50 when it is fully operational next year, is funded by a $35 million line item in the “black budget” request for intelligence funding. Representatives from the Office of the Director for National Intelligence briefed committee members on the budget last week,

Retired attorney Kurt Richard Haskell conjectured on the Paris attacks on Sunday during an interview from Costa Rica with 1776 Channel, which can neither confirm nor readily dismiss his theories. “The Muslims being used in these plots are being trained overseas by undercover CIA pretending to be Al Qaeda/ ISIS. I think all of them were trained that way. They think they are in terrorist training camps when they are instead being trained to be patsies.” -Kurt Haskell during interview with 1776 Channel Haskell ran for U.S. Congress in 2012 as a Democrat in Michigan’s 7th District where he received...

Indiana Rep Andre carson will be the first Muslim to serve on House intelligence committee. House Democratic leader Pelosi announced she would name Carson to panel at weekly caucus meeting on Tuesday, according to two senior House Democratic leadership aides. Indiana Democratic Rep. Andre Carson would be "formally announced" soon as part of the roster Democrats on the intelligence panel, according to these aides. Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison was the first Muslim member elected to Congress in 2006. Carson became the second Muslim to serve in the House when was elected in a special election in 2008 to replace his...

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi announced in a closed-door meeting Tuesday she would name the first Muslim lawmaker to the House’s Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. A senior Democratic aide said Rep. André Carson of Indiana would be named in the “coming days” to the key national security-focused panel. The California Democrat told lawmakers of the appointment during the members’ weekly caucus meeting. Carson would be the first Muslim to serve on the committee and was the second Muslim to be elected to Congress. He already serves on the House Armed Services Committee and worked for the Department of Homeland Security’s...

“This is the way I think Putin operates, and operated even in St. Petersburg. Putin is not formally speaking Mafia…he was never “made,” using this American phrase. What he did was to make illegal activity legal, which is a far more useful thing. So he…because he was…in charge of all the registrations of foreigners coming into Russia, into St. Petersburg, and all of the export licenses going abroad, you didn’t have to run the risk of illegally exporting if Putin would sign the documents for you. He could open the border going and coming for money for goods for raw...

Once a Constitutional Republic famed for its pragmatism, the United States has lately become a country notorious for its inconstancy, no longer recognizing that actions have finite and foreseeable consequences. In this space, for example, I recently argued that the release of the “torture report” by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence came perilously close to the constitutional definition of treason by “giving Aid and Comfort” to America’s enemies. Admittedly, that was a tough assessment. But barely a week after the report’s release, the Huffington Post published an article linking those revelations with their most immediate effects on our allies....

As some lawmakers purport to be stunned over the new CIA “torture report” the fact is Congress knew for years that enhanced interrogation techniques were being used on terrorists and in fact dozens of members were repeatedly briefed on the subject, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Back in 2010 Judicial Watch obtained government documents—once marked “Top Secret”—that reveal between 2001 and 2007, the CIA briefed at least 68 members of Congress on its interrogation program. This included so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The dates of all congressional briefings and, in some cases, the members of Congress in attendance as well...

Guess when you're as brilliant as Mike Barnicle, it's OK to ridicule others for their supposed lack of smarts. Today's Morning Joe was teasing an upcoming segment about a tough question that reporter Kasie Hunt had posed to Rick Perry. Mockingly trying to imagine the question, Barnicle offered "she asked him what day it was." View the video here.

"I don't know that the report that was released yesterday is that historically accurate. It reads like a prosecutorial screed rather than a historical document."- Michael Hayden, Former CIA Director from May 30, 2006- Feb 12, 2009 For the most part, the narrative that the CIA tortured, that methods were "brutal", that the program wasn't effective in obtaining intelligence, that it played no role in the finding and killing of OBL, that those involved are war criminals- all of that is pretty much cemented in the minds of a number of Americans who are only reading the headlines and buying...

Rolling Stone magazine has committed a series of astonishing journalistic blunders of late: Rolling Stone magazine has blown it again. First it outraged New Englanders by putting a photo of the accused Boston Marathon bomber on its July 2013 cover — after the horrific terror attack that killed three people and injured more than 260 — that made him appear like a sultry, tousled-hair rock star. But the single worst example of its blinding ineptitude was the UVA scandal: If that wasn’t reason enough to cancel one’s subscription, now Rolling Stone has backpedaled on its story about a woman allegedly...

FORT HUACHUCA — There are two sayings which today’s Army is striving to overcome. One is that past is prologue, or we’re always reliving over and over what has already happened. The other is when it comes to war, military leaders are always ready to fight the last one. But Maj. Gen. Robert P. Ashley said the new Army Operating Concept is “a very good job of laying out what the (future) operational environment is going to look like.” And while today’s world is already complicated, “it’s going to become more complex,” the commander of the Army Intelligence Center of...

As head of the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2009, Sen. Dianne Feinstein has spent hundreds of hours in secret briefings and seen thousands of pictures from battlefields in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. She keeps two images with her. One shows a little girl wearing a gingham dress, white tights and black Mary Janes — but the girl's head is gone. Another is of a teenage boy, duct tape over his mouth, eyes bulging out, being forced to hold two severed heads. "To me, it's what we are up against," Feinstein said in an interview. "It is a testament to pure...

Nine years as chaplain of an 800 bed state mental hospital taught me that one can be mentally ill and highly intelligent. Talking with the patients often was more interesting than talking with their psychiatrists. Mad men are not mindless. They just do not distinguish between delusion and fact. Chesterton summed this up by aphorism: Â“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.Â” This explains why it is often hard to distinguish university faculties from mental wards, save for the latter being kept under...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A former Iraqi general, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, is reported to be coordinating attacks in Iraq by foreign fighters and Iraqi regime loyalists, a US defense official said. "There are reports that the al-Douri is coordinating the attacks," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The reports in military channels fingering al-Douri as the coordinator of the attacks probably came from the recent capture in Mosul of a former secretary of al-Douri and two senior members of Ansar al-Islam who were close to the general, the official said. Number six on the US list of 55...

DEBKAfile remains temporarily on hold, due to the chief editor's sudden illness. Service is due to be resumed early December, 2014. Please accept our apologies for this interruption and assurance that DEBKA will be up and running again after this delay.

President Obama this week committed professional suicide. Let me explain. There is a theory in politics that once a leader has fired 50 or more people from his or her administration, he or she is finished. The reason being that by creating so many enemies ‘outside the tent’, the tent itself becomes too deluged with poisonous bile to avoid sinking into a quagmire of back-stabbing ignominy. Obama went a lot further than firing 50 people. He managed to single-handedly alienate 200,000 employees in the American intelligence agencies by going on 60 Minutes and ruthlessly chucking them all under a bus...

Yesterday, we said that President Obama was either reckless or incompetent. He either didn't pay attention at the briefing or kept the country in the dark about ISIS.Today, I'm leaning toward the irresponsible, or a major dereliction of duty that we have not seen in U.S. history. According to a U.K. newspaper, President Obama was told about ISIS back in 2012, or before the presidential campaign: President Barack Obama's intelligence briefings have provided him with specific information since before he won re-election in 2012 about the growing threat of the terror group now known alternatively as ISIS and ISIL, an administration insider told MailOnline...

Joseph Miller is the pen name for a ranking Department of Defense official with a background in U.S. special operations and combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has worked in strategic planning. President Barack Obama has taken a lot of flack since his Sunday night “60 Minutes” interview, in which he blamed the intelligence community for his failure to tackle the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. And that is right and proper. Because not only was his excuse of blaming us a lie, but when questioned on his lie, White House press secretary Josh...

President Obamaâ€™s 60 Minutes interview, taped last Friday and aired Sunday, is turning out to be a disaster for him, and may even be a tipping point of sorts. There are six dimensions to the disaster.1.Â By blaming the intelligence community for his failure to act on the ISIS threat, he ensured that a series of damaging leaks will be coming, and they are already starting. The UK Daily Mail, always far less constrained than the American media when it comes to revealing information damaging to the American progressive establishment, quotes â€śan administration insider,â€ť summarized in its own bullet points:...

We mention President Obama’s narcissism not as an exercise in name-calling but because it continues to be relevant to how he conducts himself in office, and it’s not pretty. This undeniable character trait was on full display in his interview with Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes,” in the sense that he simply cannot entertain the possibility, much less — infinitely less — admit the possibility that he has made a mistake or exercised poor judgment. If anything remotely positive happens on his watch, he presumes to take full credit for it — way more than the normal opportunistic politician. With...

In a "60 Minutes" interview Sunday night, President Barack Obama placed blame squarely at the foot of the US intelligence community for the rise of the Islamic State, the extremist group also known as ISIS. Citing comments from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Obama said the intelligence community had "underestimated what had been taking place in Syria," referring to the rise of ISIS militants in the country's northeast. But American spies, experts, and journalists who have been watching the progress of ISIS, the extremist offshoot of Al Qaeda, immediately pushed back against the president's assessment. "Either the president doesn’t...

Cooperation between Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND, and America's NSA is deeper than previously believed. German agents appear to have crossed into constitutionally questionable territory.

What is the enduring lesson of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the Bush administration overestimated and, in some cases, exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein? Some say it's to be skeptical of government officials who are making the case for war. I say the legacy should be skepticism toward government officials, period—all of them. Their hidden agendas can shade the case for peace as well as war, which might explain why there's no consensus among so-called experts about the threat posed today by ISIS. On a scale of zero to panic, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint...

Psychologists have shown humans are poor judges of their own abilities, from sense of humour to grammar. Those worst at it are the worst judges of all. You're pretty smart right? Clever, and funny too. Of course you are, just like me. But wouldn't it be terrible if we were mistaken? Psychologists have shown that we are more likely to be blind to our own failings than perhaps we realise. This could explain why some incompetent people are so annoying, and also inject a healthy dose of humility into our own sense of self-regard.

The Obama administration is scheduled to brief members of Congress about the Islamic State (ISIS) on Friday after the beheading of two American journalists, but several Republicans on key committees involved told Newsmax on Thursday that they knew nothing about the classified session. The briefing is to be conducted by officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center, news reports say. The officials are expected to brief members of the congressional leaders' staffs, as well as the House Intelligence Committee, Foreign Affairs Committee, Armed Services Committee, and the defense and foreign operations appropriations...

A former top official at the National Security Agency says the Islamic State terrorist group has “clearly” capitalized on the voluminous leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and is exploiting the top-secret disclosures to evade U.S. intelligence. Bottom line: Islamic State killers are harder to find because they know how to avoid detection. Chris Inglis was the NSA’s deputy director during Mr. Snowden’s flood of documents to the news media last year. Mr. Snowden disclosed how the agency eavesdrops, including spying on Internet communications such as emails and on the Web’s ubiquitous social media. Asked by The Washington Times...

[SNIP] ".....In all, the U.S. government would have access to more than a million documents detailing al QaedaÂ’s funding, training, personnel, and future plans. The raid promised to be a turning point in AmericaÂ’s war on terror, not only because it eliminated al QaedaÂ’s leader, but also because the materials taken from his compound had great intelligence value. Analysts and policymakers would no longer need to depend on the inherently incomplete picture that had emerged from the piecing together of disparate threads of intelligenceÂ—collected via methods with varying records of success and from sources of uneven reliability. The bin Laden...

Are we becoming more STUPID? IQ scores are decreasing - and some experts argue it's because humans have reached their intellectual peak Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2730791/Are-STUPID-Britons-people-IQ-decline.html#ixzz3B3dLJfeH Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

The GOP-led House Select Committee on the Benghazi terror attack shows no sign of backing down despite a report from another congressional panel that, according to a top Democrat, found no intelligence failures around the deadly 2012 assault. "There is more work to be done and more to be investigated," a spokeswoman for House Select Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy told CNN on Wednesday. Shortly before beginning its August recess, the House Intelligence Committee, also led by Republicans, approved its report on the militant attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in eastern Libya that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other...

The intelligence community is about to get the equivalent of an adrenaline shot to the chest. This summer, a $600 million computing cloud developed by Amazon Web Services for the Central Intelligence Agency over the past year will begin servicing all 17 agencies that make up the intelligence community.

Russia's swashbuckling military intelligence unit is full of assassins, arms dealers, and bandits. And what they pulled off in Ukraine was just the beginning.re are two ways an espionage agency can prove its worth to the government it serves. Either it can be truly useful (think: locating a most-wanted terrorist), or it can engender fear, dislike, and vilification from its rivals (think: being named a major threat in congressional testimony). But when a spy agency does both, its worth is beyond question. Since the Ukraine crisis began, the Kremlin has few doubts about the importance of the GRU, Russia's military...

I know that this topic is very controversial. Conservatives have always complained about radical feminism, and such radical feminists are over-represented among women with graduate degrees. Are women without college degrees better than women with graduate degrees, when it comes to fulfilling the job of wife and mother?

The Chicago Police Department, working with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and FBI, has opened the Crime Gun Intelligence Center to crackdown on illegal guns from what they call “three-percenters.” A number of agencies including Chicago PD, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the ATF, and other regional partners, will operate the new joint task force from within the ATF’s Chicago Field Division. The target of this Crime Gun Intelligence Center: a group the ATF is referring to as “three-percenters.”

<p>The White House allowed the parents of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl to take part in a series of secure video conferences with State Department and intelligence officials and senior military commanders, according to a published report.</p>

Via Breitbart, this makes two separate accusations today â€” Ed already blogged the other â€” involving government attempts to suppress the truth about Bergdahl. Bad enough that theyâ€™d ask good soldiers to conspire in it, but withholding it from Congress takes this to another level.Pay attention at around a minute in, when he says he was taken by surprise by yesterdayâ€™s NYT story about the note Bergdahl reportedly left before leaving his post five years ago. (A note which may or may not have hinted at renouncing his citizenship.) Chambliss, who holds a plum intelligence post within Congress, read...

Forget being smarter than a fifth-grader. Most Americans think they’re smarter than everyone else in the country. Fifty-five percent of Americans think that they are smarter than the average American, according to a new survey by YouGov, a research organization that uses online polling. In other words, as YouGov cleverly points out, the average American thinks that he or she is smarter than the average American. A humble 34 percent of citizens say they are about as smart as everyone else, while a dispirited 4 percent say they are less intelligent than most people. Men (24 percent) are more likely...

One Nigerian official's wish for Boko Haram: "Find them, kill them." ....... "I love this about America," he said with a tone of, if not love, then certainly reverence. "Find them, kill them. Don't wait for judicial manipulation." As the parents of the kidnapped schoolgirls become more desperate, and their protests in Abuja grow larger, he may be repeating those four words to himself like a mantra.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is clamping down on a technique that government officials have long used to join in public discussions of well-known but technically still-secret information: citing news reports based on unauthorized disclosures. A new pre-publication review policy for the Office of Director of National Intelligence says the agency’s current and former employees and contractors may not cite news reports based on leaks in their speeches, opinion articles, books, term papers or other unofficial writings. Such officials “must not use sourcing that comes from known leaks, or unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information,” it says. “The use of such...

New research has undermined the popular belief that Neanderthals were less intelligent than Homo sapiens, and challenges the widely-held view they were forced into extinction by modern humans. Many experts have suggested humans’ advanced culture and hunting ability caused Neanderthals to disappear from Europe over 30,000 years ago. …

The top two officials at the Defense Intelligence Agency said Wednesday that they will retire from those positions in the coming months, part of a leadership shake-up at an agency that is under pressure to trim budgets and shift focus after more than a decade of war, current and former U.S. officials said. Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn is expected to end his tenure as DIA director this summer, about a year before he was scheduled to depart, according to officials who said Flynn faced pressure from Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. and others in recent months....

PARIS -- A Cold War is purely an intelligence war. If you go on a Ukrainian geopolitical bender in front of a former KGB chief like Russian President Vladimir Putin without having a firm grasp of the opposition's mind-set, you risk launching yourself into a wall like some kind of drunken frat bro on a Slip 'n Slide. Here are a few handy tips for understanding the Russian intelligence modus operandi and how it differs from America's. HUMINT vs. OSINT: Russia has higher standards and capacity for espionage and intelligence operations than the West, placing a greater value on reliable...